Techniques for giving a score to a person's dance and informing the person of the scoring result are known.
Among techniques related to giving a score to or evaluating a person's dance, a technique is known by which, for example, a level of similarity between a detected posture of a game player and a sample posture is calculated, and if the level of similarity is higher than a predetermined value, an auxiliary image is generated to bring the game player's attention to details of the sample posture that are not similar.
Patent Document 1: Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2013-116311
To give a score to or evaluate a person's dance, it may be desirable to extract times at which the person beats rhythm, i.e., the person's movements of beating time or the times at which the person beats time. However, according to the technique described above, because the analysis involves a large amount of processing, a problem remains where there are some situations where it is not possible to easily extract the person's movements of beating time or the times at which the person beats time.
For example, to give a score to a person's dance, in one possible mode, the person's rhythm can be extracted by taking images of the person's movements with a camera and analyzing the taken moving images by using a computer. As for a specific method, for example, the face or a part of the body of the person or a tool (e.g., a maracas) used by the person is recognized from the moving images, by using a predetermined recognition technique such as template matching, so as to generate time-series data of movement amounts of the face, the part of the body, or the tool that was recognized. After that, a Fourier analysis or the like is performed on the time-series data, so as to extract the person's rhythm from the components in a specific frequency band. Subsequently, in one possible example, the extracted rhythm of the person is compared with a reference rhythm, so that a score is given to the person's dance according to the comparison result. According to the mode described above, however, for example, when the template matching process is performed to recognize, from the moving images, the face or the part of the body of the person or the tool such as a maracas used by the person, the process of comparing a template with a part of the moving images is repeatedly performed. For this reason, the analysis involves a large amount of processing, and a large processing load is imposed on the computer.